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The Patagonia
The Patagonia was slow, but spacious and comfortable, and there was a motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old- fashioned gait, the multitudinous swish, in her wake, as of a thousand proper petticoats. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with the splashed eagerness of a young creature.
36 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1888
92 people are currently reading
176 people want to read
About the author
Henry James
4,554 books3,940 followersHenry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
October 7, 2017
**small spoilers**
Typical Henry James writing here with this novella published in 1891 in what is considered James "middle period".
It's setting is an American steamer bound for London and the story is centered on a small group of acquaintances on board, primarily on a 30 year old American woman intending to marry a man she doesn't want. Her flirtatious fling with a young man on the ship, perhaps a last chance to escape her situation, brings on gossip and ridicule and has a disastrous ending. James, as in much of his writing, contrasts the new America and the old Europe and the changes and differences in culture and moral tradition.
Typical Henry James writing here with this novella published in 1891 in what is considered James "middle period".
It's setting is an American steamer bound for London and the story is centered on a small group of acquaintances on board, primarily on a 30 year old American woman intending to marry a man she doesn't want. Her flirtatious fling with a young man on the ship, perhaps a last chance to escape her situation, brings on gossip and ridicule and has a disastrous ending. James, as in much of his writing, contrasts the new America and the old Europe and the changes and differences in culture and moral tradition.
July 22, 2023
This 1891 ‘novelette’ (so called by Wikipedia) is, despite one significant interesting development, rather held back by James’ inability to get out of his accustomed grooves in developing his setting, plot and characterization.
At first, I was quite anticipating a new setting, far from his dual fascinations with New England estates of the rich and the gardens and hotels of western Europe. This was based on the story’s title which I unfortunately discovered referred to the name of a ship rather than the South American grassland.
Also, I once again encountered almost exclusively members of the social elite, none of whom work for a living, all of whom are consumed with their own highly personal aspirations and all of whom cultivate a persona intensely obsessed with how they are seen by others. A mother complains to her son that his attentions to a young lady involve ‘the greatest thing, that he is making her immensely talked about.’ Social innuendo is all very well and good, but I honestly feel James gave it far too much importance.
Thirdly, the story focuses again on a young woman, who just happens to be quite pretty, who finds herself in somewhat precarious financial and marital straits and who cannot avoid, even though she seems to wish to do so (she regularly wears a veil which obscures her face) becoming the centre of interest on the ship during its trans-Atlantic voyage. The unnamed narrator observes that ‘for the rest of the voyage Grace Mavis would be the most visible thing on the ship; the figure that would count most in the composition of groups. She couldn’t help it, poor girl; nature had made her conspicuous – important, as the painters say.’ From The Portrait of a Lady through Madame de Mauves and the mother and her relation in The Aspern Letters and even including the governess in The Turn of the Screw, James could not seem to avoid making such a figure central to his stories.
Finally, there is a very significant and startling development in the plot which occurs within the last two or three pages of the overall fifty pages of the narrative. Dramatic flourishes are okay once and a while, but James seems to have taken an almost perverse delight in upsetting his readers with such sudden revelations. Even the last sentence of the story: ‘It was an odious moment’ cries out for some elucidation, which James again fails to provide, seemingly content as he was with a symbolic wave of his hand and an understated ‘So there!’ as he leaves the stage.
The only redeeming feature of the story I found to be the way in which the central relationship between Jasper and Mavis is analyzed by Mrs. Nettlepoint and the narrator. It is almost Conrad-like in its representation of the way in which people come to understand the actions and motives of others not by direct interaction or conversation with them, but rather by third-party gossip and speculation. This critical appreciation of the faulty basis of what many come to believe to be reality is as real as it is revealing.
Despite this engaging analysis, the story was stuck so deep in the accustomed ruts of his narrative technique as to be one of the most disappointingly predictable of all James’ stories I’ve read.
Only hesitatingly recommended.
At first, I was quite anticipating a new setting, far from his dual fascinations with New England estates of the rich and the gardens and hotels of western Europe. This was based on the story’s title which I unfortunately discovered referred to the name of a ship rather than the South American grassland.
Also, I once again encountered almost exclusively members of the social elite, none of whom work for a living, all of whom are consumed with their own highly personal aspirations and all of whom cultivate a persona intensely obsessed with how they are seen by others. A mother complains to her son that his attentions to a young lady involve ‘the greatest thing, that he is making her immensely talked about.’ Social innuendo is all very well and good, but I honestly feel James gave it far too much importance.
Thirdly, the story focuses again on a young woman, who just happens to be quite pretty, who finds herself in somewhat precarious financial and marital straits and who cannot avoid, even though she seems to wish to do so (she regularly wears a veil which obscures her face) becoming the centre of interest on the ship during its trans-Atlantic voyage. The unnamed narrator observes that ‘for the rest of the voyage Grace Mavis would be the most visible thing on the ship; the figure that would count most in the composition of groups. She couldn’t help it, poor girl; nature had made her conspicuous – important, as the painters say.’ From The Portrait of a Lady through Madame de Mauves and the mother and her relation in The Aspern Letters and even including the governess in The Turn of the Screw, James could not seem to avoid making such a figure central to his stories.
Finally, there is a very significant and startling development in the plot which occurs within the last two or three pages of the overall fifty pages of the narrative. Dramatic flourishes are okay once and a while, but James seems to have taken an almost perverse delight in upsetting his readers with such sudden revelations. Even the last sentence of the story: ‘It was an odious moment’ cries out for some elucidation, which James again fails to provide, seemingly content as he was with a symbolic wave of his hand and an understated ‘So there!’ as he leaves the stage.
The only redeeming feature of the story I found to be the way in which the central relationship between Jasper and Mavis is analyzed by Mrs. Nettlepoint and the narrator. It is almost Conrad-like in its representation of the way in which people come to understand the actions and motives of others not by direct interaction or conversation with them, but rather by third-party gossip and speculation. This critical appreciation of the faulty basis of what many come to believe to be reality is as real as it is revealing.
Despite this engaging analysis, the story was stuck so deep in the accustomed ruts of his narrative technique as to be one of the most disappointingly predictable of all James’ stories I’ve read.
Only hesitatingly recommended.
July 1, 2011
This 1891 novelette by Henry James tells of an ocean voyage on a ship called The Patagonia, sailing from Boston to Liverpool. The unnamed narrator is friends with a Mrs. Nettlepoint, a woman of good family with a son names Jason. Accompanying them -- somewhat unexpectedly -- is a young woman named Grace Mavis, who is to marry a childhood friend whom she has not seen for ten years. During the cruise, it appears that Miss Mavis is spending an inordinate amount of time with Jason Nettlepoint, who is some years younger than she is. The usual shipboard gossip has decided that Grace and Jason are an "item," and that the woman's intended would likely be thrown over.
There is something of a surprise ending which abashes the characters circling around Grace Mavis worrying about the proprieties.
The Patagonia can be read in a single sitting and is not a bad story to begin an acquaintance with the psychological depths of James's oeuvre.
There is something of a surprise ending which abashes the characters circling around Grace Mavis worrying about the proprieties.
The Patagonia can be read in a single sitting and is not a bad story to begin an acquaintance with the psychological depths of James's oeuvre.
April 23, 2021
Character-centric novella about the passengers on The Patagonia, a ship headed for England from America.
Want to read
September 12, 2014lol!!
July 11, 2016
This appeared in a collection together with “Daisy Miller” and “Pandora”, as another story of a young woman striving to rise to a new social position, but it is far more conventional and less interesting than either of those. Both Daisy Miller and Pandora Day are, as Pandora is described, “self-made”: they don’t need a man — or, really, anybody — to validate their new place in society. By contrast, the rising young woman of “The Patagonia”, Grace Mavis, is a more traditional social climber, openly embarrassed by her mother — neither Daisy nor Pandora ever show such a feeling — and pining for the upper-class man, Jasper Nettlepoint, who is happy to dally with her but doesn’t take her seriously. Part of the problem is that James is being mostly serious, while the setup, in which Grace’s mother asks Jasper’s mother to watch out for Grace while she travels to Europe to meet the fiance that she hasn’t seen in years (self-made girls always have a fiance in the background, as we are told in “Pandora”), cries out for comedy. But we never really get to know either Grace or Jasper — everything is told from the perspective of a middle-aged gentleman who is a friend of Mrs. Nettlepoint but is not all that close with the young people — and the ending is abrupt and something of a copout. It’s not that the story is not worth reading — James is always worth reading — but it’s definitely not one of his best.
February 26, 2018
Read in Daisy Miller and Other Stories.
The setting is aboard The Patagonia a ship traveling from America to Europe. The group of people abard includes Grace, Mrs. Nettlepoint, and Jasper, Mrs. Nettlepoint's son. Grace is traveling to Europe to meet her fiance, who she hasn't seen in years and isn't happy about marrying. While aboard the ship, she begins a friendship with Jasper, which ends tragically.
This short story is told from the perspective of a gentleman friend of Mrs. Nettlepoint. An interesting commentary on society in the 1880s.
The setting is aboard The Patagonia a ship traveling from America to Europe. The group of people abard includes Grace, Mrs. Nettlepoint, and Jasper, Mrs. Nettlepoint's son. Grace is traveling to Europe to meet her fiance, who she hasn't seen in years and isn't happy about marrying. While aboard the ship, she begins a friendship with Jasper, which ends tragically.
This short story is told from the perspective of a gentleman friend of Mrs. Nettlepoint. An interesting commentary on society in the 1880s.
December 21, 2025
My, Henry. What a knock out. Really you assume it's Henry speaking, but the narrator is very much a character in this depiction of the pathetic and precarious status of a clever and beautiful girl who grew up in the wrong street. The story is told by the gay friend of Mrs Nettlepoint who finds herself an involuntarily in charge of an attractive, not quite young woman on her first passage from Boston to Liverpool.
July 22, 2025
James gives us, if not an unreliable narrator, certainly one who is self-regarding and a little self-deluding. His interference in a small shipboard affair has disastrous consequences, and it is left to the reader to share the narrator's gradual realization of how much responsibility he bears for what happens.
June 27, 2021
The sexual revolution took place to prevent incidents like the one elated in this story, I suppose...
January 1, 2016
The first half of this story is a fine study of personality and social manners. Here I encountered an illuminating segment where the first-person narrator talking to Mrs. Nettlepoint in her cabin. They are discussing the subtle nuances of the visible and imagined encounters of her young son Jasper and a young woman Grace who are both on the long voyage out to England. Both the older people are observers (the narrator) and somewhat anxious and annoyed participator (the mother).
This chapter serves neatly as an instructive analysis of the character analysis à la Jane Austen. The idea is beyond social convention into the realm of moral character and psychology. Social convention is often done to illustrate the louder colors of transgressions through individual's desire and Will. With its clear-cut class mores, or its blurring such delineation in American, the reading only on social convention would pale by the lack of a deeper reading of moral character. Henry James implied that this story does plumb that richer depth of psyche.
Intriguingly, would the young people also watch the reactions of the older ones? Would they deliberately manage theirs so as to force them out of the delusion of being the Olympian watchers?
The second half turns sinister and grim, not so much the Mrs. Pecks the scuttlebutt trader, but Mrs. Needlepoint's "maternal immorality" (in today's cheap comedy, it would be Everyone Loves Raymond's mother Marie). But the heart of the matter is the heartlessness of young Jasper, casually dispensing his time on Grace while fencing her in a socially impossible situation. The bleakness of her fate -- if we can re-read this story from her point of view from her own mother's pleading of Mrs. Needlepoint -- is pain and suffering in quiet and somber colors, yet sustained with spirit and moral integrity. I shan't re-read it because of re-imagine Grace's eyes steadily looking out from a thin veil, in a hostile world, finding no purchase for life.
This chapter serves neatly as an instructive analysis of the character analysis à la Jane Austen. The idea is beyond social convention into the realm of moral character and psychology. Social convention is often done to illustrate the louder colors of transgressions through individual's desire and Will. With its clear-cut class mores, or its blurring such delineation in American, the reading only on social convention would pale by the lack of a deeper reading of moral character. Henry James implied that this story does plumb that richer depth of psyche.
Intriguingly, would the young people also watch the reactions of the older ones? Would they deliberately manage theirs so as to force them out of the delusion of being the Olympian watchers?
The second half turns sinister and grim, not so much the Mrs. Pecks the scuttlebutt trader, but Mrs. Needlepoint's "maternal immorality" (in today's cheap comedy, it would be Everyone Loves Raymond's mother Marie). But the heart of the matter is the heartlessness of young Jasper, casually dispensing his time on Grace while fencing her in a socially impossible situation. The bleakness of her fate -- if we can re-read this story from her point of view from her own mother's pleading of Mrs. Needlepoint -- is pain and suffering in quiet and somber colors, yet sustained with spirit and moral integrity. I shan't re-read it because of re-imagine Grace's eyes steadily looking out from a thin veil, in a hostile world, finding no purchase for life.
March 12, 2014
A busybody takes the slow boat to Europe and obsesses about the suspected, illicit romance of two young persons aboard ship. Tragedy ensues. This is solid, middle-period James.
“He was of the type of those whom other people worry about, not of those who worry about other people.”
“He was of the type of those whom other people worry about, not of those who worry about other people.”
June 7, 2015
What!? Wow, that ending really surprised me! A short read, a bit unlike James' normal. But I enjoyed it.
Want to read
May 19, 2016The Patagonia is a very popular book among the readers. Please read this book and post your comments.
March 18, 2016
I read this book by accident. Turned out pretty interesting. Somebody's observations about social interactions and intrigues on a sea cruise in 1920s. Interesting to read old English.
March 27, 2022
Interesante libro histórico sobre la Patagonia. Diversos datos, efemérides, personajes sobre la historia de la “terra australis incógnita”.
February 23, 2018
I’ve been reading a lot of Henry James lately. Most of my other favorite authors from his time period are from other countries so their work is not only remote in time but in completely modern enough. James on the other hand is just close enough for happy moments of recognition and far away enough to add ~mystique~ and new perspectives. The American/East Coast sensibility bleeds into the European. Reading him always makes me realize how much the world has changed and how much people have stayed the same (oh the old clichés!). His narratorial “type” is my favorite - the obsessive observer, translating the passions from which he is detached into inner drama. But especially in his short works it’s not dry philosophizing - there’s plenty of drama and (olde timey) scandal and humor. Even stories on well-worn themes always bring some different way of looking. I love his voice and I’m always excited to read something else by him, just to see what he thought of it.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews